Since the earliest days of mass media, enthusiasts have developed means and methods for sharing their enthusiasm with like-minded individuals. Fan clubs, social gatherings, conventions, and public relations events have all served to enhance the enjoyment of mass media for those individuals with high interest.
The advent of computer-mediated communication has provided new opportunities for fan involvement. In the earliest days of computer networking, user-generated sites such as Usenet allowed devotees to share comments, insights and criticisms of popular media content. This trend has continued—contemporary media producers often develop on-line fan sites that provide additional content, background material, and related information, as well as present a forum for enthusiasts to share comments and questions.
Among fans of serial content such as television dramas, one strong preference is the avoidance of any material which might prematurely reveal plot details of unseen content. Due to the availability of recording means, some fans may view serialized content at a delay from the original presentation of the content. Most fans of continuing dramas prefer to experience the material naïve of the upcoming content, thereby maximizing the anticipatory and revelatory aspects of the experience. Accordingly, such fans seek to avoid exposure to any ancillary content created by an experienced viewer that might reveal plot details prior to viewing. Systems that assist such fans have been described in the patent literature. For example, U.S. Patent Application 2007/0157249 describes a system and method for monitoring a user's viewing progress of media in a series, then filtering peripheral media content to be consistent with the user's viewing progress in the series. Similarly, U.S. Patent Application 2012/0079517 describes a system and method for modifying a service transaction according to the viewership status of a user relative to a series of episodes. The modification may include withholding content, such as posts by other viewers, related to episodes of the series which the user has not yet viewed.
User-generated content is one form of metadata about media content. Other forms of metadata may be provided by the original content producer. Such revelatory content may bear or be assigned a temporal relationship to the media content. For example, a viewer comment about a scene in an episode is most relevant when presented in synchrony with the scene. Various systems have been described that deal with the synchronization of metadata with media content. For example, U.S. Patent Application 2009/0208180 describes a method for controlling the revelation of metadata items based on the viewing timeline of the primary media content. U.S. Patent Application 2012/0082427 describes a method of receiving secondary media content such as user-generated content, assigning a time stamp to the secondary media content relative to the primary media content, then allowing for delayed playback of the primary and secondary media content streams based upon the time stamp.
With the advent of interactive social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the consumption of audio-visual media content such as broadcast television has acquired a novel social dimension. Viewers of a television presentation may generate comments about the content in real time. These comments are then presented to other viewers of the same content, thereby enhancing their experience of the program content. Such comments may provide opinions about the content, secondary information about the actors or themes of the content, jokes or anecdotes related to the content, or simply personal observations about any subject. Viewer comments may be shared among a group of friends, or to a larger anonymous group of viewers. The sharing of such comments creates a mediated social interaction among scattered viewers reminiscent of, but more flexible than, the old-fashioned family gathering around the television set. U.S. Pat. No. 8,051,230 describes such a system allowing the sharing of spoken comments among users via a communications network. In accordance with the method of U.S. Patent Application 2012/0082427, the real-time comments may be assigned time stamps and be recorded with the associated time stamps, so that a viewer who accesses the primary media content at a later time may be presented with the recorded comments (the secondary media content) in synchrony with the primary media content upon playback.
An avid fan of a television series may wish to view and participate in the real-time social media commentary when viewing an episode, but also avoid unwitting exposure to spoilers. For an American viewer, this desire is complicated by a basic feature of the broadcast infrastructure in the United States. Standard network content is broadcast three times in the US broadcast system, first for the Eastern time zone, one hour later for the Central and Mountain time zones, and two hours after that for the Western time zone. Accordingly, fans in the Central and Mountain time zones may wish to view user-generated content originating from the Eastern time zone (the content having been time stamped and recorded for replay in synchrony with the video content) as well as de novo user-generated content originating from the Central and Mountain time zones. Fans in the Western time zone would similarly experience a combination of recorded and de novo user-generated content. A problem that arises in this circumstance is that a viewer on the East coast may continue to make comments about an episode after the broadcast has finished on the East coast; such comments may be picked up by a system displaying social media content during the broadcast to the Central/Mountain or Western time zones and be admixed with comments originating from naïve viewers in those time zones. Thus, comments from experienced viewers containing spoiler information may be inappropriately presented to naïve viewers, contrary to their desire to remain unaware of forthcoming content.
A proposed solution to this dilemma is presented in U.S. Patent Application 2011/0010774 (hereinafter '774), which describes a method for extracting meaning information from a message and determining whether to present the messages based on the meaning of the message. However, the method of '774 is inadequate to solving the above-stated problem owing to the known difficulty of accurately interpreting the linguistic content of a message and the computational burden required to perform such analysis.
What is desired is a method and system that appropriately filters and combines social media content for delayed presentation to a naïve viewer.